Using a tied hash in scalar context gives in maintperl and in bleadperl a fatal error : this was added two months ago (to test for the emptiness of a tied hash,
you should use keys()).
However,
this new fatal error was integrated into 5.8.1-RC2 and this appears to be a surprising change,
probably not suited to a maintenance release (bug #22973).

Arthur Bergman finds that the type of a reference to an element of a tied hash is now LVALUE instead of SCALAR. This is, strictly speaking, correct, regarding the internal implementation, but incompatible with 5.8.0. Moreover one could argue that references to tied hash elements should behave the same way than references to regular hash elements. Dave Mitchell proposes to make tie-specific LVs stringify to SCALAR, while other LVs remain as LVALUE.

Steve Grazzini demonstrates that $1 and the other digit-variables are not always dynamically scoped to the enclosing block, when qr// comes to play. Arthur explains what happens in the guts of perl, but this behaviour is nevertheless surprising (or so do I imagine).

Stephen McCamant did some work on B::Deparse and B::Concise. Firstly, he sent a patch to help Deparse (and other backends) to figure out the order in which BEGIN blocks and use declarations are issued, by numeroting them just like other statements. Secondly, he made several suggestions about adding information in the op tree for figuring out the place of those statements relatively to scoping operators.

Tels explains why external signatures are more secure than embedded ones for CPAN packages. Autrijus Tang then added to CPANPLUS the ability to check the integrity of a package against a separate .sig file.

Marcus Holland-Moritz finds that since 5.8.0, having hash values set to &PL_sv_undef causes the hash entries to be treated as 'placeholders'. Thus, they do not appear when checking with hv_exists() or iterating over the hash. And this new behaviour is under-documented.

He proposes that, instead of using PL_sv_undef to mark placeholders (which are used to implement restricted hashes), a new global PL_sv_placeholder should be created (and proposes a patch against RC2).

Due to an accident and to the OSCON distraction, bug reports weren't forwarded to the p5p mailing list for two weeks. As a consequence, after Robert Spier fixed the mail stuff, we received about 40 of them in a few minutes ! Some of them were already known (or even fixed), though.

Moreover, Tony Bowden walked through the bug database and found a large number of bugs that were already fixed and should have been closed. This led also to a significant number of fixes.

Chip Salzenberg tries to find a way to add additional options to File::Copy::copy() (his primary goal being to add cp -p behaviour). Slaven Rezic proposes that File::Copy::copy() could be made to support most of the POSIX or GNU options of cp(1). Which seems to involve a Getopt-like interface.

This summary was written by Rafael Garcia-Suarez. Weekly summaries are published on http://use.perl.org/ and on a mailing list, which subscription address is perl5-summary-subscribe@perl.org. Comments, corrections, additions, and suggestions are (as always) welcome.